The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We were groom-mates in our days of wonder.

  I would brush her, and her hide would twitch with pleasure. She would stretch with it, as if it were taffy to be pulled. We tried on earrings, or tied bows into manes, or corn-rowed them into long braids. But Leveza never rested long with simple pleasures or things easily understood.

  Even young, before bearing age, she was serious and adult. I remember her as a filly, slumped at the feet of the stallions as they smoked their pipes, played checkers, and talked about what they would do if they knew how to make electricity.

  Leveza would say that we could make turning blades to circulate air; we could pump water to irrigate grass. We could boil water, or make heat to dry and store cud-cakes. The old men would chuckle to hear her dreaming.

  thought it was a pointless game, but Leveza could play it better than anyone, seeing further and deeper into her own inherited head. Her groom-sister Ventoo always teased her, “Leveza, what are you fabricating now?”

  We all knew that stuff. I knew oh so clearly, how to wrap thin metal round and round a pivot and with electricity, make it spin. But who could be bothered? I loved to run. All of us foals would suddenly sprint through long grass to make the ground thunder, to raise up the sweet smells of herbs, and to test our strength. We had fire in our loins and we wanted to gallop all the way to the sun. Leveza pondered.

  She didn’t like it when her first heat came. The immature bucks would hee-haw at her and pull back their feeling lips to display their great white plates of teeth. When older men bumped her buttocks with their heads, she would give a little backward kick, and if they tried to mount her, she walked out from under them. And woe betide any low-grade drifter who presumed that Leveza’s lack of status meant she was grateful for attention. She would send the poor bag of bones rattling through the long grass. The babysquirrels clutched their sides and laughed. “Young NeverLove wins again.”

  But I knew. It was not a lack of love that made my groom-mate so careful and reserved. It was an abundance of love, a surfeit of it, more than our kind is meant to have, can afford to have, for we live on the pampas and our cousins eat us.

  Love came upon Leveza on some warm night, the moon like bedtime milk. She would not have settled for a quick bump with a reeking male just because the air wavered with hot hormones. I think it would have been the reflection of milklight in black eyes, a gentle ruffling of upper lip, perhaps a long and puzzled chat about the nature of this life and its consequences.

  We are not meant to love. We are meant to mate, stand side by side for warmth for a short time afterward, and then forget. I wonder who fathered this one?

  Leveza knew and would never forget. She never said his name, but most of us knew who he was. I sometimes caught her looking toward the circle of the Great Men, her eyes full of gentleness. They would gallop about at headball, or talk seriously about axle grease. None of them looked her way, but she would be smiling with a gentle glowing love, her eyes fixed on one of them as steadily as the moon.

  One night, she tugged at my mane. “Akwa, I am going to sprog,” she said, with a wrench of a smile at the absurdity of such a thing.

  “Oh! Oh Leveza, that’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me, how did this happen?”

  She ronfled in amusement, a long ruffling snort. “In the usual way, my friend.”

  “No, but . . . oh you know! I have seen you with no one.”

  She went still. “Of course not.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  Her whole face was in milklight. “Yes. Oh yes.”

  Leveza was both further back toward an Ancestor than anyone I ever met, and furthest forward toward the beasts. Even then it was as if she was pulled in two directions, Earth and stars. The night around us would sigh with multiple couplings. I was caught up in the season. Sex was like a river, washing all around us. I was a young mare then, I can tell you, wide of haunch, slim of ankle. I plucked my way through the grass as if it were the strings of a harp. All the highest-rankers would come and snuffle me, and I surprised myself. Oh! I was a pushover. One after another after another.

  I would come back feeling like a pasture grazed flat; and she would be lumped out on the ground, content and ready to welcome me. I nuzzled her ear, which flicked me like I was a fly, and I would lay my head on her buttock to sleep.

  “You are a strange one,” I would murmur. “But you will be kind to my babes. We will have a lovely house.” I knew she would love my babies as her own.

  That year the dry season did not come.

  It did go cooler, the afternoon downpours were fewer, but the grass did not go gray. There was dew when we got up, sparkling and cold with our morning mouthfuls. Some rain came at nighttime in short, soft caresses rather than pummeling on our pavilion roofs. I remember screens pulled down, the smell of grass, and warm breath of a groom-mate against my haunches.

  “I’m preggers too,” I said some weeks later and giggled, thrilled and full of butterflies. I was young, eh? In my fourth year. I could feel my baby nudge. Leveza and I giggled together under our shawls.

  It did not go sharply cold. No grass-frost made our teeth ache. We waited for the triggering, but it did not come.

  “Strangest year I can remember,” said the old women. They were grateful, for migrations were when they were eaten.

  That year! We made porridge for the toothless. We groomed and groomed, beads and bows and necklaces and shawls and beautiful grass hats. Leveza loved it when I made up songs; the first, middle and last word of every line would rhyme. She’d snort and shake her mane and say, “How did you do that; that’s so clever!”

  We would stroke each other’s stomachs as our nipples swelled. Leveza hated hers; they were particularly large like aubergines. “Uh. They’re gross. Nobody told me they wobble in the way of everything.” They ached to give milk; early in her pregnancy they started to seep. There was a scrum of babysquirrels around her every morning. Businesslike, she sniffed and let them suckle. “When my baby comes, you’ll have to wait your turn.” The days and nights came and went like the beating of birdlike wings. She got a bit bigger, but never too big to stand guard.

  Leveza gave birth early, after only nine months.

  It was midwinter, in dark Fehveroo when no one was ready. Leveza pushed her neck up against my mouth for comfort. When I woke she said, “Get Grama for me.” Grama was a high-ranking midwife.

  I was stunned. She could not be due yet. The midwives had stored no oils or bark-water. I ran to Grama, woke her, worried her. I hoofed the air in panic. “Why is this happening now? What’s wrong?”

  By the time we got back, Leveza had delivered. Just one push and the babe had arrived, a little bundle of water and skin and grease on the ground behind her rear quarters.

  The babe was tiny, as long as a shin, palomino, and covered in soft orange down so light that he looked hairless. No jaw at all. How would he grind grass? Limbs all in soft folds like clouds. Grama said nothing, but held up his feet for me to see. The forelegs had no hoof-buds at all, just fingers; and his hind feet were great soft mitts. Not quite a freak, streamlined and beautiful in a way. But fragile, defenceless, and nothing that would help Leveza climb the hierarchy. It was the most Ancestral child I had ever seen.

  Grama set to licking him clean. I looked at the poor babe’s face. I could see his hide through the sparse hair on his cheeks. “Hello,” I said. “I’m your groom-mummy. Your name is Kaway. Yes it is. You are Kaway.”

  A blank. He couldn’t talk. He could hardly move.

  I had to pick him up with my hands. There was no question of using my mouth; there was no pelt to grip. I settled the babe next to Leveza. Her face shone love down on him. “He’s beautiful as he is.”

  Grama jerked her head toward the partition; we went outside to talk. “I’ve heard of such births; they happen sometimes. The inheritances come together like cards shuffling. He won’t learn to talk until he’s two. He won’t walk until then, either. He won’t really be m
obile until three or four.”

  “Four!” I thought of all those migrations.

  Grama shrugged. “They can live long, if they make it past infancy. Maybe fifty years.”

  I was going to ask where they were now, and then I realized. They don’t linger in this world, these soft sweet angelic things.

  They get eaten.

  My little Choova was born two months later. I hated childbirth. I thought I would be good at it, but I thrashed and stomped and hee-hawed like a male in season. I will never do this again! I promised. I didn’t think then that the promise would come true.

  “Come on, babe, come on, my darling,” Leveza said, butting me with her nose as if herding a filly. “It will be over soon, just keep pushing.”

  Grama had become a friend; I think she saw value in Leveza’s mindful way of doing things. “Listen to your family,” she told me.

  My firstborn finally bedraggled her way out, tawny, knobbly, shivering and thin, pulled by Grama. Leveza scooped my baby up, licked her clean, breathed into her, and then dandled her in front of my face. “This is your beautiful mother.” Choova looked at me with intelligent love and grinned.

  Grama whinnied the cry that triggers Happy Birth! Some of our friends trotted up to see my beautiful babe, stuck their heads through the curtains. They tossed their heads, chortled and nibbled the back of her neck.

  “Come on, little one. Stand! Stand!” This is what the ladies had come to see. Leveza propped Choova up on her frail, awkward, heartbreaking legs, and walked her toward me. My baby stumbled forward and collapsed like a pile of sticks, into the sheltering bay of my stomach.

  Leveza lowered Kaway in front of Choova’s nostrils. “And this is your little groom-brother Kaway.”

  “Kaway,” Choova said.

  Our family numbered four.

  We did not migrate for one whole year. The colts and fillies would skitter unsteadily across the grass, safe from predators. The old folk sunned themselves on the grass and gossiped. High summer came back with sweeping curtains of rain. Then the days shortened; things cooled and dried.

  Water started to come out of the wells muddy; we filtered it. The grass started to go crisp. There was perhaps a month or two of moisture left in the ground. Our children neared the end of their first year, worthy of the name foal.

  Except for Leveza’s. Kaway lay there like an egg after all these months. He could just about move his eyes. Almost absurdly, Leveza loved him as if he were whole and well.

  “You are a miracle,” she said to Kaway. People called him the Lump. She would look at him, her face all dim with love, and she would say her fabricated things. She would look at me rapt with wonder.

  “What if he knows what the Ancestors knew? We know about cogs and gears and motors and circuits. What if Kaway is born knowing about electricity? About medicine and machines? What he might tell us!”

  She told him stories and the stories went like this.

  The Ancestors so loved the animals that when the world was dying, they took them into themselves. They made extra seeds for them, hidden away in their own to carry us safely inside themselves, all the animals they most loved.

  The sickness came, and the only way for them to escape was to let the seeds grow. And so we flowered out of them; the sickness was strong, and they disappeared.

  Leveza looked down at her little ancestral lump. Some of us would have left such a burden out on the plain for the Cats or the Dogs or the scavenging oroobos. But not Leveza. She could carry anything.

  I think Leveza loved everyone. Everyone, in this devouring world. And that’s why what happened, happened.

  The pampas near the camp went bald in patches, where the old and weak had overgrazed it. Without realizing, we began to prepare.

  The babysquirrels gathered metal nuts. The bugs in their tummies made them from rust in the ground. The old uncles would smelt them for knives, rifle barrels, and bullets. Leveza asked them to make some rods.

  She heated them and bent them backward and Grama looked at them and asked, “What kind of rifle is that going to make, one that shoots backward?”

  “It’s for Kaway,” Leveza replied. She cut off her mane for fabric. I cut mine as well, and to our surprise, so did Grama.

  Leveza wove a saddle for her back, so the baby could ride.

  Once Grama had always played the superior high-ranker, bossy and full of herself. “Oh, Leveza, how clever. What a good idea.” And then, “I’m sorry what I said, earlier.” She slipped Leveza’s inert mushroom of a boy into the saddle.

  Grama had become kind.

  Grama being respectful about Leveza and Kaway set a fashion for appreciating who my groom-mate was. Nobody asked me anymore why on Earth I was with her. When the Head Man Fortchee began talking regularly to her about migration defenses, a wave of gossip convulsed the herd. Could Leveza become the Head Mare? Was the Lump really Fortchee’s son?

  “She’s always been so smart, so brave,” said Ventoo.

  “More like a man,” said Lindalfa, with a wrench of a smile.

  One morning, the Head Man whinnied over and over and trod the air with his forelegs.

  Triggered.

  Migration.

  We took down the pavilions and the windbreaks and stacked the grass-leaf panels in carts. We loaded all our tools and pipes and balls and blankets, and most precious of all, the caked and blackened foundries. The camp’s babysquirrels lined up, and chattered goodbye to us, as if they really cared. Everyone nurtured the squirrels, and used them as they use us; even Cats will never eat them.

  It started out a fine migration. Oats lined the length of the trail. As we ate, we scattered oat seed behind us, to replace it. Shit, oat seed, and inside the shit, flakes of plastic our bellies made, but there were no squirrels to gather it.

  It did not rain, but the watering holes and rivers stayed full. It was sunny but not so hot that flies tormented us.

  In bad years your hide never stops twitching because you can’t escape the stench of Cat piss left to dry on the ground. That year the ground had been washed and the air was calm and sweet.

  We saw no Cats. Dogs, we saw Dogs, but fat and jolly Dogs stuffed to the brim with quail and partridge which Cats don’t eat. “Lovely weather!” the Dogs called to us, tongues hanging out, grins wide, and we whinnied back, partly in relief. We can see off Dogs, except when they come in packs.

  Leveza walked upright the whole time, gun at the ready, Kaway strapped to her back.

  “Leveza,” I said, “you’ll break your back! Use your palmhoofs!”

  She grunted. “Any Cat comes near our babies, and it will be one sorry Cat!”

  “What Cats? We’ve seen none.”

  “They depend on the migrations. We’ve missed one. They will be very, very hungry.”

  Our first attack came the next day. I thought it had started to rain; there was just a hissing in the grass, and I turned and I saw old Alez; I saw her eyes rimmed with white, the terror stare. I didn’t even see the four Cats that gripped her legs.

  Fortchee brayed a squealing sound of panic. Whoosh, we all took off. I jumped into a gallop, I can tell you, no control or thought; I was away; all I wanted was the rush of grass under my hands.

  Then I heard a shot and I turned back and I saw Leveza, all alone, standing up, rifle leveled. A Cat was spinning away from Alez, as if it were a spring-pasture caper. The other Cats stared. Leveza fired again once more and they flickered like fire and were gone. Leveza flung herself flat onto the grass just before a crackling like tindersticks come out of the long grass.

  The Cats had guns too.

  Running battle.

  “Down down!” I shouted to the foals. I galloped toward them. “Just! Get! Flat!” I jumped on top them, ramming them down into the dirt. They wailed in panic and fear. “Get off me! Get off me!” My little Choova started to cry. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  I was all teeth. “What did we tell you about an attack? You run and when the gunfire st
arts you flatten. What did I say! What did I say?”

  Gunsmoke drifted; the dry grass sparkled with shot, our nostrils shivered from the smell of burning.

  Cats prefer to pounce first, get one of us down, and have the rest of us gallop away. They know if they fire first, they’re more likely to be shot themselves.

  The fire from our women was fierce, determined, and constant. We soon realized that the only gunfire we heard was our own and that the Cats had slunk away.

  The children still wailed, faces crumpled, tears streaming. Their crying just made us grumpy. Well, we all thought, it’s time they learned. “You stupid children. What did you think this was, a game?”

  Grama was as hard as any granny. “Do you want to be torn to pieces and me have to watch it happen? Do you think you can say to a Cat very nicely, ‘Please don’t eat me,’ and that will stop them?”

  Leveza was helping Alez to stand. Her old groom-mother’s legs kept giving way, and she was grinning a wide rictus grin. She looked idiotic.

  “Come on, love, that’s it.” Leveza eased Alez toward Pronto’s cart.

  “What are you doing?” Pronto said, glaring at her.

  “She’s in no fit state to walk.”

  “You mean, I’m supposed to haul her?”

  “I know you’d much rather leave her to be eaten, but no thanks, not just this once.”

  Somehow, more like a goat than a Horse, Alez nipped up into the wagon. Leveza strode back toward us, still on her hind legs.

  The children shivered and sobbed. Leveza strode up to us. And then did something new.

  “Aw, babies,” she said, in a stricken tone I had never heard before. She dropped down on four haunches next to them. “Oh, darlings!” She caressed their backs, laying her jaw on the napes of their necks. “It shouldn’t be like this, I know. It is terrible, I know. But we are the only thing they have to eat.”